Friday, 28 September 2007

A Harvard student must be given extra break time during a medical licensing exam to pump breast milk, a Massachusetts appeals court judge ruled yesterday.

The student, Sophie C. Currier, 33, of Brookline, Mass., had sued the National Board of Medical Examiners after it denied her request for more than the standard 45 minutes of allotted breaks during the nine-hour exam, which she will take over two days.

She said she risked medical complications if she did not nurse her 4-month-old daughter, Lea, or pump breast milk every two or three hours.

In overturning a ruling that denied Ms. Currier the additional 60 minutes of break time she requested, Judge Gary Katzmann said yesterday that she needed the extra time so she could be on “equal footing” with men and nonlactating women taking the test.

The medical examining board said that although it planned to appeal, it would give Ms. Currier the additional time if Judge Katzmann’s order is still in effect when she takes the exam, set for next week. She must pass the exam, which tests clinical knowledge, to receive her medical degree. Without it, she cannot start her residency at Massachusetts General Hospital.

In the 26-page ruling, Judge Katzmann said refusing to allow additional time meant that Ms. Currier must choose to either “use her break time to incompletely express breast milk and ignore her bodily functions, or abdicate her decision to express breast milk, resulting in significant pain.”

“Under either avenue,” he wrote, Ms. Currier “is placed at significant disadvantage in comparison to her peers.”

Additional time does not give her an unfair advantage, he found, because answers cannot be changed after the student leaves the exam room.

Ms. Currier said the ruling was a boon “for nursing mothers who are trying to juggle family obligations and further their careers.”

The board said in a statement that it would appeal the ruling to a three-judge panel to protect the “integrity of the exam.”

Dr. Ruth Hoppe, chairwoman of the board’s governing body, said: “We have to maintain rigorous and consistent standards that are fair to everyone taking the test. The stakes for assessing competence of physicians are high.”

But she insisted that the board tried to be flexible. “We routinely review surveys of test takers to find out whether the computers work, whether break time is sufficient and other areas, and adjust our policies,” Dr. Hoppe said.

About 33,000 people took the exam during the last academic year.

Ms. Currier has already received some accommodation from the board for dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. She can take the test over two days instead of one, for example.